Ancient Times, Familiar Faces

What Does A Mummy Look Like? Not So Different From You And Me, As Lifelike Portraits Prove

April 16, 2000|By Michael Kilian, Tribune Staff Writer.

NEW YORK — Whether taken from scholarly tomes or popular movies, the image we have of the storied, mummified dead of ancient Egypt is a forbidding one: semi-decayed horrors wrapped head to toe in cloth bandages. From the decorated, sculpted lids of their wooden or stone coffins, grim and expressionless visages stare perpetually, their lifeless but all-seeing eyes bearing silent witness to eternity.

And perhaps cursing those who disturb their rest.

But these ancient dead were not gods or spirits or fiends. They were living, breathing human beings, little different in their natures or the essence of their daily lives than those of us milling about the planet today.

In other words, mummies were people, too, and an extraordinary new exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has in effect brought some 90 of them back to life.

The exhibit, titled "Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt," features uncannily realistic portraits that allow us to look across the centuries into the faces of Egyptians. There we find the same cares and woes, joys and pleasures, personal attractiveness or the lack of it, that we might encounter almost anywhere in the present.

"They are very familiar," said museum Egyptian art curator Dorothea Arnold. "That is why this is so direct for us."

The portraits were generally painted on wood panels and attached to the cloth in which the mummy was wrapped or the sarcophagus in which it was entombed. In their time, which was about two millennia ago, they were a very integral part of Egyptian burial rite and custom.

"You would have the mummification, which is based on the belief that the body had to be preserved for afterlife--an old, old Egyptian belief," Arnold said. "Also, there was the other belief that you had to go in front of Osiris [the Egyptian god of fertility, death and resurrection] and stand up for what you had done during your life. Then there was the idea that you had to have a very realistic portrait of at least the head, which led to a mask or to a painting. That was something peculiar to the Egyptian culture."

In the days of the pharaohs, these were crude images at best--highly stylized wood or stone carvings or one-dimensional hieroglyphics. But with the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. and the establishment of his general Ptolemy on the Egyptian throne, the Egyptians began to adopt many aspects of Greek culture, including realistic painting and lifelike portraits.

This trend was refined during Egypt's period as a Roman province, which began three centuries later. The Egyptian people became more sophisticated and cosmopolitan and very definitely a part of the Mediterranean world. In the more affluent reaches of society, they were as much Roman in fashion as they were in government.

But they remained Egyptian in religion and funerary rites. Had they commanded artists with the same skills, the pharaohs might well have had such lifelike portraits as these with them in their pyramids and tombs.

The portraits, which were common from the first through third centuries A.D., reflect ethnic diversity. The faces range from the decidedly dark-skinned and African, much in keeping with the population of Egypt and the Sudan, to very light-skinned countenances that would be familiar in Europe today.

"It was one of those examples in antiquity where you have a real multicultural society," said Arnold.

These are paintings of the dead, but the most striking thing about them is how lifelike the images are--imperfections and all.

One young beauty in the show is described as being "like a pearl set in gold," but it's noted the artist represented her as having a left eye slightly higher than the right, and two pointed ears with one slightly crumpled. A matronly woman is painted with rolls of fat showing about her neck, though this is thought to have been an attractive feature in that time. Another is shown with dark bags beneath her eyes. A man with hazel eyes and a bulbous nose has considerable gray in his hair.

Many of the faces are happy--even animated, but there is sadness in their stories. Presumably, many of these people died fairly young. One of the portraits is of a "fortunate" boy perhaps 12; his name, Eutyches, is inscribed upon the wooden border of the painting. He was described as a onetime slave who had been given his freedom. Exceedingly bright and comely in appearance, he is considered to have had a happy future in prospect, but something cut it short.

One common aspect here is wealth or access to it. The portrait subjects are thought to have been from at least the upper middle class or higher.

"A portrait cost more than what a craftsman or tradesman then would have earned in a year," said Arnold. Of thousands of mummies uncovered at one site, only about 10 percent had portraits with them, she added.